Update: I've patched ufraw to open these 32-bit DNGs. Of course, internal processing is still 16-bit, but the range is chosen according to initial exposure compensation passed from command line. That means, if I start ufraw with "ufraw foo.dng --exposure=15", it will throw away 12 EV of highlight detail (initial exposure - 3EV) and will use these bits for shadow detail.

With this patch, I can run these DNGs through uniform_exposure.py and it just works. Here's what I've got from this example, with default settings:

The patch is very rough and quite invasive; I doubt it will be accepted if I submit it to ufraw tracker in at this stage. But if you want to try it, I'd be happy to see your feedback.

The two photos eight stops apart output is really an incredible result. I was unable to achieve this with those two photos even with manual adjustment via my normal methods. The others with more frames have less noise in the shadows, but the difference is not noticeable at normal resolutions. And if that is just what the script produced without manual adjustment, this is really significant. This may be a better HDR solution than anything else around now.

Yes, all these pictures were obtained without manual adjustment. Caveat: if you want to use uniform_exposure.py you will have to compile ufraw after applying my patch (easy on Linux, but on Windows it doesn't seem easy).

About Lightroom: after watching this tutorial, there seems to be a HDR processing mode in LR that lets you move the exposure slider from -10 to +10, but my 32-bit float DNGs can only be adjusted from -5 to +5. As far as I understood from here, DNG files are imported via Adobe Camera Raw, which is limited to 16-bit output. Marsu42 confirmed this. Boo...

After reading this I thought floating point DNG is the way to go, but I couldn't find a straightforward way for regular users to edit these files (except for dng_validate and my modified ufraw, both requiring geek skills).

If you have some contacts at Adobe, feel free to ask them to take a look at these files. I'm a total noob regarding Adobe products, so I'd like some help.

Yeah, I have no way of patching UFRaw, but I'm playing around with Ceronoice now. In one case I had somewhat better results than exposure fusion using Ceronoice with only two files out of a seven frame bracket. I had very poor results with a particularly terrible bracketed scene (the one with the brown floor/furniture bright window included in the brackets I uploaded).

I can't believe how fast it is. This opens up the possibility of creating multiple versions of a file.

32-bit tifs can be adjusted in ACR 8.0 from -10 to +10. Just tried it. (Big difference!) I don't know if there's some problem with outputting to tif. I personally have no need to save adjustments in a 32-bit format, but if someone wanted they could open tifs directly in Photoshop and skip ACR.

For TIF output I'd also have to do debayer, apply white balance and (here I'm a bit lost) do all sorts of color space conversions, gamma and so on. Basically, a complete raw converter from scratch. Maybe dcraw-float can help here, didn't look into it.

First results:- I simply ran CeroNoice * in all directories (blindly)- I placed all the DNGs in one folder (had to rename them manually, this was the most painful step)- I opened each DNG in the patched ufraw (with --exposure=10), adjusted WB (spot WB on the walls and 1-2 notches towards warmer color) and saved ID files (*.ufraw)- ran uniform_exposure.py with default settings while writing this post- after that, I looked in the JPEG folder and got these files (didn't pixel peep them yet):

Now I'd probably tweak the parameters to brighten them a bit. This workflow feels very confortable to me.

Continued: I've changed shadow_level to 200000 from 5000, which resulted in some obscene exposures being fed to enfuse (roughly from 0 to +18 EV). The resulting images got brighter, but had low contrast (example), so I've ran "mogrify -sigmoidal-contrast 4 *.jpg" (on 8-bit jpeg, but if you want stronger edits you should switch to 16-bit tif):

Attempt 3:

Looking at some reference JPEGs posted by engardeknave here, I realized this kind of photos should be even brigher:

The colors are really bad, but we're getting very close on the levels. I say this because they are different photoshoots and they're starting to look consistent. Once they're consistent, there's a baseline, and it's just a matter of personal taste from there. In ACR there's sliders for "blacks" and "whites", which seem to adjust shadow and highlight contrast respectively. That's what I'd probably use on most of these. I think there might be something going on with conflicting colorspaces too. They should all be sRGB, but I might have shot some in AdobeRGB.

God these houses are ugly. I should have thought of this before, but I just dug up all the finished shots from my site. I had to do a lot of color adjustments for most of these, so don't get hung up on the colors. Also the finished ones are all straightened out too.

Also, all the sorts of advanced stuff you can do with PixInsight (like PixelMath, image analysis and statistics) seems to me like it would be right up your alley. It's easily extensible and scriptable as well (it's designed that way), you can easily work with linear data and huge precision (64-bit float). Most of the tools and workflows are aimed at astrophotography though.

Ok, something must be wrong with your dngs, A1ex. Maybe the headers. I found that I could save a 32-bit TIF as DNG from ACR (strangely it stays 32-bit). Then I can open it up in ACR and adjust exposure from -10 to 10.

Your dng is ~84mb, Adobe's is 150. A 32-bit tif is 240. Photomatix produces a 32-bit .hdr file that is 63mb. This works great in ACR, except there's no way to open multiple .hdr files at once in ACR. So frustrating.

I tried that in ACR already. No effect. (The options for those of you who don't have ACR and can't read moonspeak are "Linear (demosaiced)" and "Uncompressed".)

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CeroNoice does not make any highlight control. I have no idea what you are comparing

I'm talking about the sliders in ACR. The exposure control goes from -5 to +5 with your dng and -10 to +10 with Adobe's, but I wasn't sure if that was really meaningful until I tested with a few of the sliders in ACR.